Outside the Joy

by Ruth Awad

Outside the Joy is filled with poems that sear with lyric clarity about grief, love, survival, and wonder amid personal  loss and environmental collapse. 

Tracing losses both interpersonal and universal – from a mother’s failing heart to environmental and economic decline ravaging ancestral homelands – OUTSIDE THE JOY is a compendium of abundance in a world rife with want. With a voice as singular as it is illuminating, Awad explores the sharp contrasts of our shared the human capacity to hurt and to hold one another, the love and grief that grow from our ephemeral connectedness. These poems unearth the sacred in the ordinary and invite you to do the same – “if only / you’ll let the world / soften you with its touching.”


"What a gift to be haunted by these words."  —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 3, 2024

Reviews

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Staggering, smart and beautiful.

[Maggie Derethik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly beautiful poetry that will make you cry and laugh, and then cry again.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hear, here, a remembered crying. I scrape forgiveness from Ohio to Ohio without a sound. I am in the bearable deepness of Ruth Awad’s latest poetry collection, Outside The Joy, where inquiry is a crop unjudged for the blueness of its yield. I want to tell you where I am that you know I’ve disappeared. Loss is an animal changing search parties in a museum dedicated to exhibiting the same, held differently, gun. This is a verse of hidden performance and dark display. Mother, sister, place, peace. Awad is a poet of the between-life, of old anger and resettled cure, and works this work into one of unmarked resettings to love the world with burnt care. How else, how else. Inside the inside, it shapes answer with response, and whole gods lose muscle to the memory of carried creatures.

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've admired Ruth for years, after meeting her at a reading another friend was reading at during AWP. It's been such a pleasure to read so many of the poems in Outside the Joy as they were published in magazines, and to now hold them in my hands. It's a stunningly moving collection--accessible, direct, sassy at times and always full of heart, bite, the desire to keep living despite all the personal and world tragedies. I was moved often, and am already going back to reread many of the beautiful poems here.

[Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to be a better animal.
I want to love what I can while I can

really beautiful stuff. poems about loss and grief primarily, both the personal (the author’s mother, dying from a heart ailment; her small dog) and the global (our polluted, plastic-slicked planet). elegiac and aching. i’m glad that i picked this one up on a whim!

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible, compelling, beautiful collection of poetry. I devoured it in one sitting. There are many standout poems, but my personal favorites were “Reasons to Live” and “in the gloaming, in the roiling night.” The line “O, windless, wingless sky, show me your empire of loneliness, let me spring from the jaws of what tried to kill me”? That line lives in my head rent free. I feel it resonate in the heart of me.

If you are a fan of poetry, please read this collection. You won’t regret it.

[Alfonse Battistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a fascinating book. I personally found it hard to cut through some of the lush literary webbing, but the stories of loss and love in here outshine any excess.